Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Cardano Foundation Live: Our Updated Delegation Strategy
Recorded: May 28, 2025 Duration: 0:59:39Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent AMA, the Cardano Foundation unveiled its new delegation strategy, allocating 140 million ADA to seven DREPs to enhance governance and representation. The discussion emphasized the importance of community engagement, diverse voices in decision-making, and the need for a balanced approach to governance that fosters growth and inclusivity in the Cardano ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello everybody and welcome in. We're just going to give this a few minutes to get all
of our speakers on stage and to allow a few more folks to roll in. Hang tight. Thank you. All righty. welcome in everybody.
Welcome to today's Xspace.
We're just going to give this another minute or two to get our speakers on stage.
Perfect.
Fred and Georgia are both up here.
Can you guys hear me all right?
Loud and clear.
Okay, perfect and clear. Okay.
Yes.
All right, then I'll say we can go ahead and get started.
Welcome into today's Xspace, everyone.
Today's an AMA centered around Cardano Foundation's new delegation strategy.
So it's essentially going to be just a conversation between Fred and Giorgio,
and we're going to open up at the end for some community questions.
So get your questions ready, maybe drop them in the chat below, and we'll try to get to as many as we can towards the end of the discussion.
All right, I'll go ahead and pass it over to Fred now.
Maybe you can go over our updated delegation strategy and yeah.
updated delegation strategy and yeah.
Certainly. Very happy to do so. Welcome everybody and thank you for taking your time to listen. I know there's a lot of spaces going on. There's a lot of information floating around. We thought it would be important just to take a few reflections on the first sort of data observations we've seen after Voltaire went live.
One of the things we're seeing is that we're seeing some lack of representation,
or more likely some representation gaps.
We see some DREPs being extremely successful, which we're of course extremely happy about,
but there's also a risk that we have some concentration or introduce some concentration into the system.
So the other part we see is that builders and developers
are underrepresented among DREPs.
And as we see, this is a risk because it could be
that we get into a situation
that we don't have enough technical representation at large
across multiple horizons and verticals.
So we want to ensure that we have more informed voting.
We want to have more technical voices and a more balanced influence.
In order to do so, we basically selected seven D-Rubs and we delegated to them.
And we basically, you know, we're not going to send them any kind of emails
or any kind of instructions on how to do their job or anything like that. We basically said, you know, if you keep within the
Cardano ethers from the
basically from the
from the Genesis Constitution, right?
And within the document we call our Cardano, we have some very broad ethers as well.
We believe that they're going to do an amazing job and represent a lot of the builders
and technical people in there.
So the goal is really to decentralize decision making
and amplify the underrepresented voices
and potentially close some of the gaps.
And as we see things mature, things might change over time.
But we think this is a good way to move forward for now.
Yeah, Giorgio.
Yeah, I mean, I cannot add to that. I think we vetted that the DREPs were actively participated in the governance and we did not
screen for what their political view is and what they voted in the past.
We just took active builders and active DREPs.
I think it's as simple as that
awesome and maybe you could share a little bit about our um our strategy about how we selected
these different d reps you know um what what exactly did we look at um what were some of
the qualities we were looking for in these DREPs when selecting them?
Maybe I did due diligence on some of them,
but I invited to speak to Nicolas
because he did the legwork.
Let's see if he's available to talk.
He's the most suited.
Yeah. yeah there he is welcome nico hey everyone sorry for being late and i can gladly answer that question of what we actually looked for i mean fred and george have already alluded to that
one thing that of course was really
important that these d-reps have been contributing to cardano so either building tools building
infrastructure that helps others to build and yeah fill these blocks on cardano or they have
their own product that do so and then on the other hand what's also important is that we delegate to exist so all of these d-reps
have been d-reps not just for a week or for a day for an epoch but for quite some months and they
have participating so we looked at their um not how they voted but if they voted if they participated
and that is also very important to us right right, that there is some consistency. And the seven that we selected, really, they ticked all of the boxes. And as Fred has mentioned, one thing that we don't want to do is tell them how to vote on specific things.
Because if we do that, we could just delegate to our own DREP.
But here it's really about decentralizing decision-making and the voting power.
So that's how we looked at it.
Awesome.
And maybe you could go over into some specifics.
Like we could go over maybe who we chose, what made them stand out to us,
and yeah, basically why they
were chosen and what we think that they'll bring to the table yeah absolutely so one thing i'll
also pin quickly to the space the nice blog post that we released and there you can find the seven
different d reps that we've delegated to and to just give you a quick overview of who that is.
So first one is Tempo.Vote.
Some of you might know them.
They're hosting a governance platform that allows everyone to either register as a DREP,
participate in governance as a DREP.
I know they're also working on something of like crowdfunding, maybe governance action
deposits or a really, really cool thing. Build crowdfunding, maybe governance action deposits.
So a really, really cool thing.
Builders, they're from Vietnam.
Then another group that we're supporting is Cedan Lab.
They have, yeah, they developed many developer kits.
Some of you might know them.
They have quite some iconic names.
They're the Whiskey, Vodka, and Gin dev kits. And they're also building for quite some time on Cardano.
Then the third one is Social Impact DAO.
What they're now doing currently, they're running a quadratic funding voting round on Cardano.
So they have innovated on that aspect of how to, yeah, so grassroots micro
donations, that's the best way how to think about it.
Another one is Sercorin, he has built changwatch.com, that's a real-time dashboard tracking DREP
voting power, so think about the minimum attack vector, how many DREPs does it need to pass
the different thresholds.
Very cool website, definitely check that out.
It's changwatch.com.
And then the last three, of course, are also great DREPs.
That's Kyle Solomon, CEO of Drip Drops.
You know him probably also as Adafrog, constantly contributing, also doing his best in the product committee.
Then the other two, last but not least, of course, is Chris Giannelloni, the co-founder
of Blink Labs.
Blink Labs, well-known Go developers on Cardano.
They're also building a client, a Cardano node client in Go and many other things.
And then the last one is Mesh.
And Mesh, yeah, they're providing and building
open source TypeScript SDKs.
They have a multi-sig framework.
I think now also recently, what was it?
Some sort of new wallet.
So these are the seven DREPs that we have delegated uh to each 20 million
ada yeah great builders thanks thanks so much nico so that's a total of 140 million ada wow
maybe fred maybe you could give us an idea of how this kind of fits into our greater strategy of empowering builders in the Cardano ecosystem and maybe how it fits into the treasury or the NCL or DREPS.
What does this mean essentially for the Cardano ecosystem?
I mean, there's plenty of ways of looking at it, right? But one of the ways I'm quite excited about it,
as many people probably know,
we built a set of tooling in Java called Yatsy Store.
And we've been super excited to see both Fluid Tokens,
but also USDM starting to basically deploy
and use these libraries.
But for a very long time time we sort of observed that when
people get catalyst funding they build up a stack or an SDK or they build up some stuff,
but if there's no real adoption happening on top of it, this code base might not be maintained.
And you know it's of course okay to be experimenting, it's okay to do different
things, but in essence we are looking at how do we
get to a situation that there is a commercial adoption on cadano meaning that people they
build something which is actively being used and there's end consumers who is you know getting an
added value out of that and that is filling blocks so in this case here what we've been looking at
and saying you know what um we could you could obviously delegate to ourselves or we could try and give a handout to D-reps who has built us.
Because, you know, actually being a D-rep is if you want to do it correctly, you actually have to be quite active.
You need to go in and have a methodology.
You want to be transparent about how you vote.
You might have an agenda around those things.
You might have an agenda around those things.
So giving them some support in the voting landscape
by basically creating an increased builder influence on Cardano.
And hopefully we would then by that also get, you know,
yeah, more maintenance of the nice repos
and the great work they're doing
and also cast some love in that direction.
So when people are looking at Cardano
and thinking about, you know, what kind of architecture and looking at Cardano and thinking about what kind of architecture
and what are they going to build and what kind of
dApps are they going to build,
that some of those
will stand out.
These DREPS
will also vote on treasury spending.
So it's critical to understand the tech and the
ecosystem needs. And for us
around the treasury spending, what's really
important about,
and also how we sort of looked at these particular DREPs,
is this is all people who has somehow inclined
or are building towards a set of very specific DApps
who has a use case.
So again, going back to, you know,
we need more people who get economic benefits
of building on cadano and become dependent on cadano for their product offering um yeah so in
short this delegation is really about giving support to those best place to shape the future
in our view and the future for cadano is very very very bright, but it does need, we need more marketing.
We need more awareness of all the power you can do now on this best layer one out there.
And we need to spread this love around to as many people as possible so they start actually building and deploying in Cardano.
Yeah, absolutely. I'd say the goal is really to kind of decentralize the decision making
a bit more and to amplify the underrepresented but really essential voices in Cardano, those
who are actually building the protocol.
Giorgio, I'm curious, do any of these people that we selected, the people that we delegated to, 20 million, do any of their projects kind of excite you?
Are there any standouts or any projects that you'd like to discuss and highlight here?
I mean, as a CTO, I need to be neutral.
I think all of them, they're doing a good job.
Maybe I know the social guys very closely and coming from a digital
identity background seeing that they're also building digital identity a digital identity
solution is quite cool i'm a big proponent of client diversity so with theink Labs and the Go based Cardano node and I'm also partisan
there but I think everybody deserves to be picked so I will stop here
that's not really the Italian way Giorgio, huh? The way well put. Yeah.
This was more of the Swiss way, right?
To be very diplomatic.
Yeah, to be neutral.
Yeah.
Absolutely. So I'm interested to hear from you, Nico,
about how you think this is going to kind of fit
into the bigger picture of the cardano ecosystem
cardinal governance how it might affect the the treasury and the ncl changes
yeah absolutely i mean right the most important thing in general i think is that
the stake so ada participates in governance right i, the ADA, the 140 million that we're now delegating to these seven DREPS has previously,
if you look at it on chain, right, you can see it was delegated to the auto abstain,
predefined voting option, right?
Very important.
And so in one way, it was participating, but not really.
So for me, and for us, I think in the foundation, it would be ideal if as much ADA
as possible is delegated to active DREPs that shape the future of Cardano, that provide these
economic opportunities to build out these interesting use cases and just fill the blocks
in a way, right? So how do I see this play out with the budget and NCL? I think these DREPs that
were delegated to have very diverse views on some of these topics. I'm looking at it,
I'm looking at how they write the rationales, what they and how they will vote on the NCL
or on the budgets or on the treasury withdrawals in the long run. But I think what's important is
you just empower these people and have more stake in general, participate in governance. Because if we have more diverse voices participate,
it's beneficial in the long run for Cardano.
Because we don't want to see the voting power concentrate
in only a few very powerful DRAPs.
But we really want to see this diverse group of DRAPs
that includes builders that
includes community builders as well that includes advocates from the different regions where
cardano is present right so it's all about creating this diversity that will in the long run hopefully
yeah lead us to better outcomes and i think these d-reps that we've selected
already are a very great step.
And there are a lot of other great DREPs, right?
This is also very important to mention.
So I also encourage everyone,
if you look at the DREPs in your network
and maybe delegate, redelegate sometimes,
look at some DREPs that have not a lot of voting power, right?
There are great DREPs that are below one million voting power,
that write rationals, that put in hours of work each week
to review all of these actions.
And they are not yet really well represented
when it comes to the voting power.
So, yeah, this is, I think, something that we should just do
as an ecosystem also to decentralize
the voting power as much as possible yeah i think i'm rambling a bit sorry that's okay
when we talk about that i mean one thing we also did announce this week right is that
we got very strong indication even though the intersect web page is not updated yet we got a
very strong indication from a
lot of really really cool teams that they would like to be part of the constitutional committee
and therefore we've decided not to run for the constitutional committee here. I know we are still
lacking a few data points it would be great to see you know that everybody who's planning to run that
they actually you know put it into the tooling so everybody's aware of it. But at the moment, what we sort of observed by Twitter and been in contact with quite a few,
obviously there's going to be around 10 very, very solid teams.
And therefore, we also decided basically not to run as a constitutional committee member.
Now, if it turns out that we are needed we will
of course stand up and and we will join again but at the moment we we see that the community is
really coming together in small alliances and you know you know taking up the mantle from the current
icc members both in terms of how we've done things, how we structured the keys.
As many people probably know, we looked at it
from very different security aspects, the different ICC members,
but also how we've been writing the rationales
and how we've been trying to interpret the constitution.
And so we're going to step away from that
and let somebody else step in there.
And then we're already working on some improvements to the constitution, mainly around clarity and other things to ensure that we can continue moving forward.
And we're hoping sort of, you know, end of the year together with a coalition to suggest you know a set of improvement to the constitution
so it becomes clearer for outsider people so people who's not been part of the amazing process
here in caderno but also so it becomes clear for the constitutional committee members who has to
to do the final call whether an action is constitutional or not
call whether
an action is constitutional or not
I'm looking forward
not needing to take those hard
decisions on a
weekly basis
I think it was fun
fun times but it's nice
to let go and observe
we can always kick them out
the new CC if we don't like them by
giving no confidence right this is once in cardano life this will probably happen right and
it's better not to be on top now i'm joking maybe you guys don't know me but i joke all the time
i don't think we have the voting power for a non-confidence
vote, Jojo, but I'm sure that the community
will stand together if they see something they don't
accept, but we've been very
fortunate to be a part of the start of the process
and we're looking forward to
see how it pans out
with the current candidates who is
coming in now and I'm really
excited to see also like
people forming new teams who's been part of other teams as well
all right jacob yeah i want to do with this yeah so my next question is about um so we're still
actually a member of the icc of of the Interim Constitutional Committee, and yesterday we took a couple actions.
So we found that it was constitutional, but we also voted no on it.
So I wanted maybe Nico to give an overview of that for everybody, of maybe the process and the rationale behind our voting process.
Yeah, absolutely. I can do that really quickly. As an interim constitutional committee member,
we have assessed that governance action for the 200 million ADA net change limit setting
is constitutional. So it ticks all the boxes it's not violating
any articles any guardrails um so from that perspective that's fine right and then of
course because we're also a d-rep and we have disclosed how we do this process so if you
go to the cardano foundation website cardano foundation dot.org slash governance you can find there how we approach these things so i will
not go through our step-by-step process but we take a lot of consideration and we deliberate
everything internally quite a bit and then we come up with a decision and for for this governance
action the 200 million ADA net change limit,
as a DREP, we have decided to vote no on it.
And the main reason is that we have now
only recently adopted the 350 million ADA net change limit
on Cardano that was approved
with above 70% of DREP approval.
And if we now change the net change limit too often,
even though it's constitutionally permissible,
it would be and it could introduce some challenges
with the predictability and also the way
and make it way harder for people that build out these budgets
that need this continuity, this kind of solid foundation to build budgets and then treasure withdrawals.
So that is the reason why we voted no, but I also encourage you to read our rationale
where it's explained way better than I do right now.
But yeah, this is why we voted that way.
And as always, read our rationale.
It's there.
And if you have any additional questions, just send me a message.
I'd be happy to help.
Yes, the rationale has now been pinned to the top of the space.
So if anyone clicks on that thread, then you'll be able to go and see our votes,
see all of our rationale, why we acted the way we did.
All right.
So we've covered our delegation strategy.
We've covered our decision not to run for re-election on the ICC.
We've covered our recent votes as a DREP and an ICC member.
I think we can open this up to community questions.
What do you guys think?
I think that's a great idea.
I had the pleasure of representing Cardano at Jitex in Berlin last week, where about
10 people had a big booth there.
We were the only blockchain among close to 100,000 people
and over 1,000 vendors, and we got a lot of leads.
But we also got a lot of people who are really passionate about Cardano
who showed up in ties and suits
and in their capacity as other technology companies.
And I had the opportunity to really speak to a lot of people there and in their capacity as other technology companies.
And I had the opportunity to really speak to a lot of people there and answer a lot of questions.
And it was really exciting to make some clarity
around some of those things.
So let's open up the mic and see what we can do
to bring clarity to the Cardano Foundation
and the Cardano ecosystem.
Okay, great.
So if anyone has questions, just go ahead and send a request to speak,
and we'll bring you up on stage, and we can keep the conversation rolling.
Maybe in the meantime, while we wait for people to request, I'm interested to hear a bit more about Jitex, Fred.
Yeah, so first time we were at Jitex,
we had a small booth.
It was in Dubai last year.
It is really, you know,
it's one of those traditional trade fairs around technology.
So we're talking about, you know,
Tesla is there, there's flying cars,
there is, you know, nanotechnology,
there is quantum computers.
There's all sorts of really, really sort of, you know, both from high tech hardware to software.
And what we noticed at Jitek last year is that there was a lot of interest around blockchain.
And there was quite a few blockchains and crypto companies present.
And Jitek this year, it was this time in Europe, and now they sort of scaled out. blockchain and there was quite a few blockchains and crypto companies present and that giant
x this year it was this time in europe and now they sort of scaled out they're going to do more
multiple events and we we basically got a lot of inbound requests from you know very large companies
who are starting to see cadano as a very serious player and be to be able to have a you know an
infrastructure they can touch.
I also did an interview with TechCrunch on stage,
where we spoke about, for instance, AI,
we spoke about the state of the Cardano ecosystem.
I hope it was recorded and people can see it.
Plus, we did some workshops around Misumi,
as you know, with Service Plan,
who's right now together with Inmaker deploying on Cardano. So I think that was, yeah, to be honest, that was a really good
experience. And it was really nice to be in a place where a lot of people have problems,
which potentially can be solved by blockchain, instead of being in a place where we normally
compete with other blockchains about being in a small aquarium
it's like we're finally in the ocean and we're really proud to show what we can do
yeah it looked like we had a really good turnout at jidex um So I saw someone just requested to speak, but it's like they're not up here now.
He's up here.
Oh, he's up here.
I don't see him.
So if anyone has any questions for Fred, for Giorgio, for Nico, for any of us, just go ahead and raise your hand and we'll bring you up to the stage. We can keep the conversation rolling. There we go. Ken and Eric,
let's bring you up. All right, welcome to the stage, Ken.
Stage is yours.
Okay, let's see.
I hope this doesn't rug me.
Okay, so yeah, thank you for bringing me up here.
I have a question to Cardano Foundation,
and I'm not sure if you have the direct answer to it but
if you like you just pick your first thought on the subject so Intersect they are now looking into
the roles of the different committees and I have been asking a little bit around the community what
I have been asking a little bit around the community what the community is expecting from the Civics Committee in 2025, 2026.
Do you guys have any thoughts on that, that you can share with us?
What are you expecting from the Civics Committee?
you expecting from the civics committee yeah i mean i mean i'm i'm part of the civics committee
so i might be biased here a bit right so hi ken eric nice to see you again um but yeah from the
civics committee i think what we what we need to expect is that i expect i think what what i would
like to see us do in the civics committee because because I'm also a member there, along with you, Nana Zafo, and a lot of the other great, great members of the Civics Committee.
Really shout out to all of you guys, right, is to see how we can improve the governance experience on Cardano and I think to be this neutral ground of information collection,
maybe what I was thinking about and I wanted to bring that up in our next meeting, so great
that you're here, is actually can we be this kind of sensory organ for governance improvements
in a way, right?
Bringing all of the different people together, listening and then recording it. Because it needs people, especially in this decentralized governance world,
that sort of work as this, how do you call that, archivists in a way.
Maybe that's a bit of a boring term, but it needs people, it needs someone to record it.
And of course, it can be ai as well probably
but maybe a musumi agent but yeah that that's what i think but i saw also that i cut off fred and he and i'm really sorry for cutting you off oh don't don't be sorry about that i'm sure you're
uh you're much better suited to than i am right i mean in general i would say you know what we
expect from intersect is to be a you a collaboration body, a place where people can come together off chain and deal with these really, really hard questions, which we can't express on chain yet, plus be a place where we can, you know, we can coordinate changes to the constitution, but also changes to the protocol parameters and so forth.
And I think there the civics committee has a very crucial role in that going forward.
And I do expect it to be data driven as well.
So I would really like to see the civics committee use more on-chain data, but also start tapping into some of those proof of concepts,
which is happening, which one of them is something we're doing
with the University of Zurich, where they're basically spinning up
a bespoke testnet, where they're going to basically look
at the social science behind how people congregate on Cardano
and how they vote based on different incentives
and when you move different protocol parameters and how people cluster and so on.
So at least from my point of view, I have quite high expectations
in terms of how this is going to move forward.
Bridging the off-chain with the on on chain, more data science, but also keep
representing the human element in governance.
Thank you so much for answering that.
And just like a follow up question.
So I, as far as I understand, Cardano Foundation is perhaps the organization in the Cardano blockchain ecosystem
that is most connected to the institutional, let's say, place in the blockchain space. We have
more ETFs and ETP products. Have you heard anything in regards to what they are expecting,
Have you heard anything in regards to what they are expecting, let's say, from the governance part and leaning on the civics eventually?
Yes, we have.
Yeah, you being Scandinavian, me being Scandinavian, so I'll just give it to you directly, right?
What Cardano stands for is credible decentralization
and what the institutional players are extremely excited to see is that there is not one person
who can change the course of Cardano but we actually do have a written down constitution
and we have that expressed or part of it at least the guide guide rails on chain. And they're very excited about this.
And this basically means that we can move forward with certain projects,
which other blockchains can move forward with.
Because there's an uncertainty around if you bet on Cardano from an infrastructure perspective,
can somebody suddenly go in and change the course of the rules or basically change the playing rules?
On the other hand, there has been some concern about whether or not this will slow us down.
So if you look at institutional investors, so not just institutional in terms of how we use the blockchain for the features and so on. But you really look at the investor space, some investors have expressed concern around,
you know, Cardano was already quite slow in the deployment of functions, features, etc. Now when
we go all governance and we open up this credible decentralization, what can we expect in terms of
product to market fit can we expect that
you know that people flock to cadano and how much are you going to be um discussing internally about
who's right and who is wrong compared to actually getting action and and getting transactions on
chain and actually start breaking away from uh you know what we've been seeing and observing on
from what we've been seeing and observing on many blockchains,
which has been basically a lot about value transactions
or buying or selling an asset, right?
It's been about NFTs, meme coins, and some DeFi.
And they're basically asking right now,
how can you continue evolving
and basically showing that Cardano is so much more
and not just sort of biggering around, if I can use that term.
So I know it's probably a little bit negative loading around commerce.
And I think the answer we are saying to that is that now we have a tri-party government.
We have all these things written down and we might be doing optimization, but we're doing that together with, you know, universities, academics, engineers, you know, with a very passionate community.
We have all these things written down and we might be doing optimization,
And we're able to prove that.
Right. So in general, what we see right now, both from the institutional investor space, but also from the institutional user space is a very deep optimism.
but also from the institutional usage space is a very deep optimism.
And I was together with a bank this week who happens to be a bank of banks,
meaning that they enable crypto trading for other banks.
And they gave me a data point.
Normally, I'm very open to sharing these things.
I'm not so sure that I was allowed to share too much, right?
But let me just give you the data point here.
So what they were basically telling us, so based on the banks they're servicing so i think there's currently
seven or nine banks they're servicing uh for for what we see from from q1 up to now is the 78
percent of the institutional so basically the banks are buying uh ada and uh 22 22 22 is on the sales side. They even see that we are, they see more volume on certain
days in Cardano than they see in other sort of very famous similar layer ones, which is a bit
surprising. We do actually see some positive notes around that, but it does actually require that we continue forward.
We need to keep the ball rolling. We cannot stop up and be hampered by governance.
We need to continuously move the ball forward and we will do mistakes.
It could be that we end up in a situation that the constitutional committee members is not acceptable for the community and we need to then call for a change.
And that's good, but we cannot stall.
And I think this is also one of our expectations to intersect.
When we speak about treasury withdrawals and budget and so on, we cannot let procedure stop us.
We really need to keep moving the ball forward.
And that is what's expected of us.
Fantastic.
Thanks so much for the question, Ken.
It looks like the next one is from C-Swap.
The floor is yours.
Hey, guys.
This is John Kravitz behind the C-Swap account.
Yeah, I mean, I think Fred, you and the team
have been doing a wonderful job
in terms of legitimizing Cardano,
you know, making sure we have a presence
on the global stage, you know,
networking with institutions
and, you know, creating a lot of long-term
value relationships, Cardano.
My question is more so about the state of the ecosystem right now.
I would say over the past year, we've seen a decent amount of churn when it comes to users.
We've been losing users within the ecosystem. we've seen a decent amount of churn when it comes to users.
We've been losing users within the ecosystem.
And it definitely seems to be an incentive for both the founding entities,
the community, aid holders, so on and so forth,
stake pool operators to increase transaction volume.
You know, so one of the things that we've really been pushing for, you know, is like an ecosystem, you know, marketing and kind of growth hacking initiative.
And like, we're working on that with, you know, all the founding entities and D-reps and stuff to try and put something together,
like an RFP for an enterprise marketing firm.
You mentioned marketing.
And as I mentioned, on the institutional level,
CF is doing an amazing job.
But how can we grow you know, how can we, you know, grow the ecosystem, like, in the
meantime? Because some of these things are going to take time, and a lot of us within the ecosystem,
you know, who've been carrying a lot of the risk, you know, want to see more of an investment and more of a focus on ecosystem
growth now. And it doesn't necessarily need to be focused on, you know, NFTs or mean coins or
whatnot, even though, you know, one could argue about the merit of different types of protocols.
But what can we do to grow our ecosystem now?
Is the question.
Maybe I will take this because this is what I think about every day.
And we recently were in our yearly gathering together
and the whole week was around how to fill the blocks.
And we came to the conclusion that we really
need to fill those blocks, but we cannot fill it with garbage.
We need to find meaningful transactions in a way.
And one way to do it is to help the existing builders
by providing guidance, tooling, and funding opportunities through mentorship or through
hand-holding for the existing opportunities that are out there.
And at the same time, we are still taking long-term bets with the Identity Wallet, with
our enterprise adoption strategy.
Those bets, if successful, are bringing diversity of transaction
and things that are not going to be happening tomorrow,
but hopefully in the future will differentiate us
from the meme coin chain or the NFT chains.
So we are doing a little bit of a balancing act to prioritize today, as you say.
doing a little bit of a balancing act to prioritize today, as you say. And believe me, I'm pushing
internally to do as much as possible with DeFi and NFTs, still keeping our focus on the enterprise
adoption. So believe me, this is all we think about today is one of our pillar adoption.
And it's difficult, right?
Because when you want to generate transaction,
there's some easy ways to do that.
But when you want to have meaningful transaction,
it gets much, much more difficult.
I think one thing we really want to emphasize to everybody here right is that the
way the blockchain works is that is it's very hard to verify what business does what right
so people that they tend to write about it on web to web pages and stuff like that but if there is
a way that everybody was building on Cardano would actually put a little tracker, a little bit of metadata in and say,
you know what, we're doing this track and trace.
So we are NASA, we are XYZ, and this is our transaction.
So you can start pile that up.
You can actually verify who does what, and we can actually showcase much more
the power of Cardano because there's so many transactions
who might only have an ADA handle or something like that,
which is already a good start, but doesn't go all the way.
So I do think that there's some room for improvement
and also how we think about, and people can be anonymous
if they want to, it's not about that, right?
But I do think we can showcase more of the activity,
what's really happening.
And I always emphasize to people, if you don't know what to have as a screensaver,
eutxo.org is a fantastic place to start.
It always opens up interesting conversations.
Thanks so much for the question, Ciswa, John.
Yeah, thanks.
All right, next question. I just wanted to highlight the fact that, you know, Pierre, you know, who's a very strong advocate of the ecosystem there at Cardano Foundation, you know, is really helpful.
And, you know, we'd like to see him, you know, and his team receive, you know, as much support as possible, because I think that he has some great ideas.
So I just wanted to give, I don't know if Pierre is listening,
but I wanted to give him some flowers because he is trying very hard,
you know, to, you know,
help with the ecosystem in its current state and not just, you know,
future endeavors. So thanks guys.
Absolutely. Yeah. thank you so much for
the kind words. We'll definitely pass those along to Pierre. All right, next question goes to Maureen,
just in the interest of time. Oh, hi, everyone. Hi, Nico, Frederick, and everyone else. Thank
you for bringing together this space and engaging with the community.
I really appreciate that.
I read the rationale on the NCL,
which Nicole mentioned.
I don't know if I can ask a question about that.
I don't know if I can ask a question about that.
Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Of course, Marie.
Thank you, Nico. So I have a genuine question about the NCL would have been relevant
during the deliberation of the initial 2025 NCL.
But so many community members, myself included,
felt that the original process moved quickly
without any kind of public debate.
And given that we are now seeking
or seeing a sustained community push back
on the 350M from the DREPS,
I just wanted to know,
doesn't that suggest that the initial consensus building process
might have been insufficient?
And I'm curious, how does the foundation suggest
we should handle situations where substantial community
concerns surface after governance decisions
without creating the continuous challenges precedent that is mentioned in this rationale.
Let me put it simply.
What's the foundation's take on finding that sweet spot between stability and actually listening
when the community collectively raises their hand and says,
oh, hang on a minute, right?
So that's my question.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
So the way we look at it is quite simple.
So currently we act in multiple roles,
and it's always very difficult if you have multiple roles. and you have to question if you have bias in certain things.
So as an ICC member we basically 100% look at what is the current formulation of the Constitution
and what was the intent behind that coming together.
So when we were in Argentina, what were people trying to achieve with that?
So what were they actually saying or trying to put to paper?
So that's the one part.
And we then have a cross-functional team.
You can look that up in the caranofoundation.org under governance. You can see how our processes have a cross-functional team. You can look that up in the cardanofoundation.org under governance.
You can see how our processes, we have a cross-functional team
who debate that and they write a rationale.
As a DREP, we go back to really thinking about, you know,
what will bring us the most operational, resilient
and enterprise-grade blockchain for the generations to come?
And how do we get to the sweet spot behind
having transactions right now but also you know getting scalability and transactions in the future
we were just doing some modeling right and we're sort of looking at you know you know we probably
need you know a billion more transactions to get to a situation that we are economically sustainable
and governance is hard and what we're doing is really hard, but we need to keep the ball
moving forward.
And if we stub up too much right now, it's going to be quite dangerous.
And then as the Canada Foundation, we have a whole community team where Nikko is a part
of and so on, which is basically trying to also get the consensus and really monitoring what is the voices out there and what is people concerned about and how do we address that if at all we can.
But a part of the large sort of collaborative effort is really Intersect's job, right?
It's the place where people should come together and discuss these things.
should come together and discuss these things and we do participate in intersect in multiple
committees but we also provide data to intersect and multiple other entities around what's actually
happening on chain the health of the chain the constellations etc nico you want to add anything
to this yeah just one thing right maureen and i think we we all agree that the
process could have been better initially i mean there have been so many changes and one thing
that we also made clear in our drep rationale is that we for 2026 and beyond when it comes to the
setting of the net change limit we said that we would and i'm now quoting from our rationale uh that we would advocate for
exploring mechanisms that allow d reps to express more nuanced preferences okay maybe that's a bit
too technical so what that means is so going forward ideally right you want d reps to have
not just a binary decision yes no okay abstain as well on one value, but you have ideally at the same
time, I don't know, five or six NCL values, exactly how that should be done needs to be
discussed and figured out by the community, but to give people more opportunities to cast
their opinions and their votes.
So yeah, this is, I think that was important to mention and we recognize that, but great
question, Maureen.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, thanks so much, Maureen, for the great question.
All right, next one goes to Jenny.
I guess this will be our last question of the session.
Hey, guys.
Thank you for hosting this.
I love seeing Fred here in an AMA type of space.
This is really great. I really love it. I love seeing Fred here in an AMA type of space. This is really great.
I really love it. I have a few questions. I know you said one question, but I promise
it'll be like they all go together. So I'll just separate it into one in like strategic intent,
and then the other one transparency and accountability. So my question is this
delegation strategy a temporary initiative, or does the foundation view it as a long-term mechanism to support representation and governance?
And does the foundation have any plans to act as a derep itself in the future, or will it remain committed to delegating its voting power rather than directly participating in governance decisions?
And then I'll move to the others. delegating its voting power rather than directly participating in governance decisions and then
i'll move to the others it's a temporary thing we would like to see how it develops
but we think right now this is the right way to do it and yes we will continue being a d-rep in
the future until we dissolve the foundation because the community has taken over or maybe
we need to stay a bit longer
depending on how liability and other things are playing out awesome thank you for that that was
uh short and sweet so then i have uh another question that can have a few parts so does the
foundation expect the d reps it delegates to clearly disclose that delegation in their public bios
or profiles for transparency with the community? Or will the foundation encourage or expect the
D-reps to provide public rationales for their votes, especially now given the increased weight
they carry, right? And does the foundation expect the D-reps to vote on all governance actions
during the delegation period? I think it's a yes to the first two. And the other one,
we can't answer yet, because it really depends on how much governance actions there is.
What we don't want to create is a situation that some, you know, like an amazing development
company who is writing code and creating adoption suddenly is hunkered down into governance because the chain is being, I wouldn't say spammed, but if you suddenly
have 100 governance actions, they need to take a view on, right?
We actually want people to build, deploy and fill blocks, right?
So on the third one, I would say, it really depends on how much happening,
but we really truly hope that at least governance actions
was related to the technical landscape
and to the builder landscape
that they're definitely answering those.
Well, that was great.
That's all I had.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for hosting this.
Yeah, thanks for the question, Jenny.
All right.
I think in the interest of time, that'll do it for today's space.
I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who came and listened, everyone who came up to the stage to ask a question, to everyone who spoke.
Thank you so much. This was a super interesting space, and I hope it was also informative for the community as well.
Thank you so much. Any last notes, anybody?
I'm disappointed by the lack of spicy questions. I have last words. Can Fergie
come on Spaces more often, please?
Certainly, I'd be happy to do so. on spaces more often please
certainly i'll be happy to do so um um yeah um well that's a lie i i'm not a very big fan of twitter or some of you know or x or whatever it's called these days but i would be very happy to to
jump on a space every one or two weeks if you have good questions and you want to talk to me
then definitely just reach out to our community team and we get it in the books.
And also like what Georgia said, you know,
don't be scared of asking spicy questions or something like that.
One of the reasons we sometimes, or at least we're not aggressively defending
or in other ways sort of picking up certain things on X is because X is
actually these days being used as a marketing brochure about what's happening on Cardano.
So if you go in and you do due diligence and you go in and use large language models and you kind
of look at what's happening around Cardano, a lot of the things which is being discussed on X
is becoming the marketing of cardano and therefore
we prefer to take some of the things in in discord channels and some of the things in
slack rooms and it's not because we don't want to be transparent and don't want to have arguments
about certain things but we need to be very concerned about what is the actual reputation
of cardano and how do we get to a situation that everybody, when they think I need a blockchain solution, the first choice is Cardano.
And it's not like, oh, but aren't they like super angry at each other?
And, you know, what happened with, you know, the redemption process or all those things?
Because actually the story about Cardano is beautiful.
The purpose about Cardano is beautiful.
And the scalability and operational resilience of Cardano is beautiful. The purpose about Cardano is beautiful.
And the scalability and operational resilience of Cardano is beautiful. And we finally now have all the features we wanted to have the last eight years.
So our strategy around X is really how do we ensure that the outside us who's looking at this is seeing an adult blockchain who is ready to do business. And then when we see some of these more spicy things, we tend to do that in more like say one on ones. they are recorded but they're not being picked up in the same way as a twitter thread is and um so
yeah i think that's my two cents about that but yeah i'd be very happy to join into some more
spaces and if you are hosting a space out there to all of you amazing contributors uh feel free
to reach out to nico or tell me or whoever it is and if if i have time i'm very happy to join your
space and and talk about it if i feel i can add something or I'll be very happy to get somebody from the foundation
who knows more about it than I do, who can join.
Don't be scared of inviting me to a space.
I'm very happy to join it.
What if it's a therapy session?
Therapy session.
Very well said.
I'm not a big fan of pain, but yeah, therapy sessions is always good in a trusted environment.
Yeah.
Why not?
All right.
Well, I'll take this opportunity to close the space. Just want to remind everybody that the space was recorded,
so you can always go back and get any insights that you need.
This is part of our ongoing monthly AMA series where we just want to engage with you.
We want to engage with the Cardano community, share our insights.
We want to answer your questions.
And so, yeah, thank you again, everyone, for joining.
Thanks to everyone who spoke everyone
who came up to the stage and asked a question and we will see you next month thanks so much everybody Thank you.
